Rudy Huyn, who many of you may know as the developer of popular third-party clients for social media apps on Windows Phone, has finally joined Microsoft. After working for five years at Dropbox, Huyn is joining the Redmond giant as Principal Software Development Engineer on the Partner Application Experience (PAX) team.
After 9 years of close collaboration with @Microsoft, it's time for me to take it one step further and officially join them.
I'm now part of #PAX and will work with this team on great app experiences and OSS projects for current and upcoming Win10 devices. Stay tuned! pic.twitter.com/NBEWBLhHFy
— Rudy Huyn (@RudyHuyn) October 23, 2019
Huyn is joining Microsoft at a very interesting time, with Microsoft about to launch a new OS variation called Windows 10X,. The software giant first demoed Windows 10X on its upcoming dual-screen Surface Neo earlier this month, and this new form factor means that developers will soon have to update their apps so that they can make good use of the two screens.
Even though the “UWP apps are dead” refrain has become a bit louder among Microsoft enthusiasts in recent months, Huyn has been advocating for the contrary. Just a month ago, the UWP developer penned a blog post about the state of UWP apps in 2019, where he made it pretty clear that UWP is the only technology built for the new form factors that Microsoft and its OEM partners are creating right now:
UWP is far from dead, it’s one of the keystone of the future for Windows. Let’s remind that a large majority of first party apps and Windows components (Start Menu, Action Center, Settings…) are UWP. Let’s also remind that Microsoft invests a lot in this technology: Ink, Windows ML, ONNX (…)
To be clear: UWP is the only technology which, when targeted by a developer, ensures an app can run natively on any windows 10 (including variants: Xbox OS, Windows Lite, Windows Core..) device and able to fully use the capabilities of this one.
As one of the biggest UWP evangelists out there, we have to wonder why Huyn didn’t join Microsoft sooner. Well, we’re glad that it’s finally happening, and we can’t wait to see his contributions to the PAX team.